Library of Congress: Library and WGBH Acquire Historic TV Coverage of Senate Watergate Hearings . “The Library of Congress and Boston public broadcaster WGBH announced today that gavel-to-gavel television coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973, donated to the Library by WETA Washington, D.C., has been digitally preserved and made available online. Produced by the National Public Affairs Center for Television (NPACT), the hearings were taped during the day and rebroadcast every evening on public television for 51 days, from May 17 to Nov. 15. These broadcasts became one of the most popular series in public broadcasting history.”

My Modern Met: 25 Million Images to Be Placed Online by 14 Art Institutions Around the World . “Art history lovers already have several resources, like the Europeana database and Google Arts & Culture Institute, where it’s possible to view incredible art from multiple collections. And it’s possible to focus in and see masterpieces from the Metropolitan Museum of Art or Guggenheim, but most of these archives simply present the artwork as you’d see them if you went to the museum. What if you want to dig deeper? That’s where Pharos comes in. ”

Google News has reformatted all its RSS feeds. I have many Google News RSS feeds, but they’ve been wonky for a long time. I hope this fixes them. Will be doing some experimenting over weekend. Maybe I’ll get an article out of it.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

New York Times: DNAinfo and Gothamist Are Shut Down After Vote to Unionize. “A week ago, reporters and editors in the combined newsroom of DNAinfo and Gothamist, two of New York City’s leading digital purveyors of local news, celebrated victory in their vote to join a union. On Thursday, they lost their jobs, as Joe Ricketts, the billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade who owned the sites, shut them down.” It appeared at first that the digital archives for these publications would be completely lost, but this looks to be no longer the case.

The Verge: Russia’s social media meddling could spell the end of online anonymity. “This week, representatives from Google, Facebook, and Twitter are appearing before House and Senate subcommittees to answer for their role in Russian manipulation during the 2016 election, and so far, the questioning has been brutal. Facebook has taken the bulk of the heat, being publicly called out by members of Congress for missing a wave of Russian activity until months after the election. But one of the most interesting parts of yesterday’s proceedings actually came after the big companies had left the room, and a national security researcher named Clint Watts took the floor.”

Voice of America: Afghanistan Blocks Social Media Services. “Authorities in Afghanistan are temporarily blocking WhatsApp and Telegram social media services in the country, citing security concerns, officials confirmed Friday. An official at the Afghan Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, ATRA, told VOA the social media tools will be suspended for 20 days. The decision follows a request from state security institutions.”

Ars Technica: Company that sought to control Google search results is a no-show in US court. “Earlier this year, a small Vancouver software firm called Equustek earned an extraordinary legal win against Google. The Supreme Court of Canada ordered the search giant to de-index all pages from a former Equustek distributor—not just in Canada, but worldwide. Google’s response to that was to file a lawsuit in US federal court asking a judge to rule that the Canadian order is unenforceable in its home country.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

André Staltz: The Web Began Dying In 2014, Here’s How . “Before the year 2014, there were many people using Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Today, there are still many people using services from those three tech giants (respectively, GOOG, FB, AMZN). Not much has changed, and quite literally the user interface and features on those sites has remained mostly untouched. However, the underlying dynamics of power on the Web have drastically changed, and those three companies are at the center of a fundamental transformation of the Web.” Gah. Good afternoon, Internet…

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Re Google News RSS Feeds – The linked article talks about manually changing hundreds of news feed URLs.
And easier way in Feedly is to use the Add Content, put in the link – https://news.google.com/ and it will list all the Google News RSS feeds. Just click on FOLLOW for the ones you want.

BillK, the RSS change at Google affects their keyword-based RSS feeds – e.g.: collect all Google News items with a headline/snippet containing the words ‘bunny’ + ‘fluffy’. Those feeds need to be changed slowly and manually and individually in one’s RSS feedreader, and journalists and editors will have hundreds (if not thousands) of them set up. So far as I can see there’s no way to export the OPML from one’s feedreader and then search-replace Google News URL paths in Notepad++.

Ah – I didn’t realise it was talking about keyword RSS feeds, as I don’t use them.
As well as journalists, after doing a search I see that this change is affecting many thousands of websites that include keyword RSS feeds for their readers. Quite a big upheaval!
That’s the problem with Google and Facebook – they are so big and control so much of the internet that they can pretty much act just as they please.